For all our sisters,mothers, daughters and babies.

Is press and publicity manipulation aimed at Labour Party Conference a suitable use of NHS money and time?

The local management of the NHS and Liverpool Women’s Hospital want fundamental and unpopular change. They applied for money to rebuild the Hospital on the site of the benighted Royal Liverpool University Hospital. Unsuprisingly they did not get the money.

The team behind these plans includes the local STP, the CCG, and the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Trust. To push these plans they have used the media in many ways. They claim that their media intervention was successful in reducing the imapct of our demonstration to Labour Party Conference in September 2018. “The impact of the demonstration march was perceived to be less than the campaign group’s previous activities”.

The state of the NHS, with under funding, privatisation, reorganisations in favour of big corporations, outsourcing, low pay, cuts in services and rationing of care is profoundly political, but interevening to affect a demonstation to Labour’s Conference is hardly aceptable even in that context. It is a questionale use of NHS resources.

More than our campaign’s entire budget will have been spent on this media offensive. This is taxpayer money that should have been spent on patient care, in a city with really poor health oucomes and where nearly twice as many babies dying before the age of one than the national average.

Our Campaign to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital has large and widespread public support, and our campaign fundamentally disagrees with this plan. We want to keep a women’s hospital and to keep it on its current low rise and green site. We object to spending more than £100million on the project when women and babies in Liverpool face major health issues.

Our petition has 46,000 signatories, online and many more on paper. Our campaign has gained support from Labour Party branches and even Labour’s conference. Diane Abbott MP, Emily Thornberry MP, and Jonathon Ashworth MP (Labour’s spokesperson on the NHS) have all spoken at our demonstrations. The campaign is now in its 4th year.

We support the work of Liverpool Women’s Hospital. It has remarkable successes and dedicated, hard working staff. Most of Liverpool’s Babies are born at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and it has many excellent services. We are aware of problems and difficulties, but LWH is well worth protecting.

In the context of the Climate Emergency and major concerns about air quality, putting the birth of the the majority of Liverpool babies in an air polluted traffic islnd and highrise blocks seems frankly ridiculous.

In key documents at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital Board Meeting on 2nd May 2019, this document ‘Strategic Aims and our Corporate Objectives 2018/19’ was presented.

Included in he report were these sections. “..the need for a move, more decisively, to a multidisciplinary hospital site within 5-10 years.”Commissioner support retained despite lack of success in STP Capital bid, with plans for a way forward being developed.”

Recent developments of note where these key messages were used occurred during September 2018 in advance of the Labour Party Conference. The Trust referred to the key messages to counter a planned demonstration against the plans for the future by a local campaign group. The Trust’s key messages received significant media, online, social media and public exposure with an overall average reach/audience for TV/radio/printed news of over 410k and an average reach/audience for LWH social media and website posts of almost 40k. The impact of the demonstration march was perceived to be less than the campaign group’s previous activities due to our proactive factual messaging and anecdotally the Trust feels that stakeholder understanding about our future is now more clearly understood as a result.

The board claim that;

“Dialogue is ongoing with NHSE, MPs, councillors and other stakeholders to ensure the case for change is well understood”

So in this context they feel it is acceptable to pay for whole page adverts in free sheets and in the Liverpool Echo? Is it right to be putting forward a whole major media intervention?

When the plan to “move” Liverpool Women’s Hospital was first launched they ran a story about how dangerous it was ro transfer women to other hospitals but now somehow the figures for transfers, the main plank of the earlier media message, have dramatically dropped to just one!

Liverpool and Merseyside need a Women’s hospital, focussing on improving the lifetime health of women from the womb to the grave. We need a health service that recognizes the needs of women. We must improve the lives and health of women in this city. A well funded hospital with a committment to the health of women could lead the way for other hospitals. This hospital could link up others with the aim of improving women’s health across the nation. Women spend more of their life in ill health than men do.

This is not, in any way, acting against men

“As we come marching, marching, we battle too, for men, For they are women’s children and we mother them again Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes, Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses”.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Women tend to look after their health more than men do, so the difference is not from risk taking or deliberately unhealthy lives, even if some do take risks. Though women live longer than men do, they live in worse health for more of their lives. Women from poorer areas, like Liverpool, endure 34 years more ill health (You would get less for murder!) than women from more affluent areas. Women from poorer areas have shorter lives, with more illness and this is getting worse. Within Liverpool, life expectancy is 10.2 years lower for men and 8.3 years lower for women in the most deprived areas of Liverpool than in the least deprived areas of the city. That’s just within the city. The differences with wealthy areas of the country is even greater

‘The gap in life expectancy between women living in the most and least deprived areas has also widened, falling for women in the most deprived areas and continuing to rise for those in the least deprived areas.” Professor Danny Dorling

In 2015 a World Health Organisation Report showed that Life Expectancy of women in the UK was is the second lowest in western Europe. The UK is ranked 14 out of 15 nations; we need a focus on women’s health.

Healthcare is just one way we can help women’s health. We have also to fight low pay ( especially for mothers ) poverty, expensive and poor quality childcare. bad housing, pollution, stress and abuse. But in this storm what we have, we hold; we will not surrender the benefits earlier genserations have won for us.

There are many aspects of health treatment that are specific to women.

Teenagers still have major problems with periods and acne, some very serious problems. No contraception is perfect and some have side effects.

Mesh,breast implants have been the source of many scandals caused by profit seeking at the expense of women’s health.

Mental health is a major health issue for women. The same numbers of women and men experience mental health problems overall, but some problems are more common in women than men, and vice versa. Twice the percentage of women in work suffer (or admit to) mental health issues than men do. Some mental health issues are related to hormones and reproduction, some to poverty

Endometriosis1.5
million women suffer from endometriosis but it takes 7 years on average to get
a diagnosis. That’s one in ten women in debilitating pain.

Heart disease is a major killer of women, more so even than the horrible breast cancer that ends the lives of so many of our sisters.

Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke are all diseases with distinct female issues.

We need research and focussed treatment. We need the research done at Liverpool Women’s hospital to be expanded. This hospital would give a great case for significant increases in investemnt if we can win the battle to get a government that respects its people.

We are in a politically driven storm of cuts, privatisation and destruction in the NHS. Full details can be found here. Having established the Internal market the privateers have now decided to privatise the service at the regional level. To garner the greatest profits for the large companies operating at this large scale, the NHS are bringing some services back in-house, so it will be more profitable from the very big US health care companies.

We are short of beds, short of doctors, nurses, midwives, and the myriad of professionals working in the NHS and the devoted ancillary staff. Poverty wages makes women ill, yet outsourced companies pay these wages to women and men who work in the NHS. Let’s hope the ancillary workers keep on fighting for better pay and conditions. They will have healthier lives and use the NHS less.

What we have we hold!

We must defend Liverpool Women’s Hospital and fight for more, much more investment in health. This is the sixth richest country on planet earth. There is wealth aplenty to fund the NHS.

What causes this extended ill health in women?

Poverty plays a part. Drug research based on men not women plays a part, the level of importance given to women’s health and unthinking sexism, also play a part. So do the physical facts of women’s hormones and of childbearing capacity, whether or not we have children.

We have specialist hospitals for many conditions; a hospital for women is deeply needed.

For all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers, we need a women’s hospital!

It’s for the babies too!

For each and every one of our precious babies, we need an
excellent world-class maternity hospital
In Liverpool. We must defend what we have and insist on improving it.

Liverpool’s infant mortality rate is at its highest level since 2010. ”Some 5.2 infants died per 1,000 live births between 2014 and 2016, significantly higher than the national average of 3.9 deaths per 1,000 births.”

In 2017 1 in every 225 births ended in a stillbirth. For every 1,000 babies born, 4.2
were stillborn, according to the Charity
Tommy. Other babies die shortly after birth and still more have significant
birth injuries.

…mortality for the poorest infants in the UK is rising ( getting worse) every year since 2011. This is despite mortality continuing to improve in all other European countries, which often still benefit from very rapid improvements in health no longer seen in the UK. The most recent rise in premature deaths is now leading to a situation where overall life expectancy could begin to fall for all groups. It is already falling in the poorest areas and for the poorest groups.

The Nuffield trust says “The UK has made less progress in reducing stillbirths and neonatal and infant deaths over the last two decades than many other developed countries”.

Sadly Liverpool Women’s Hospital has made saving on maternity this year despite this death rate “Maternity activity has reduced as anticipated and is expected to have deliveries in the region of 8,200 (2017/18 8,600). The service has reduced costs in terms of pay and non-pay and has also reviewed service income and costs as part of the “right size project” .

Is this the response we want to the news of increased deaths of babies? Surely the extra capacity could support women after birth far more effectively than they are supported now.

The NHS is not a democracy, nor is it socially or communally responsible. The NHS answers to Simon Stephens and to the requirements of their grand plans and privatisation. But camapigning does make some difference.

The big companies involved in the NHS have more and more say. Their purpose is profit.

The future of
the Liverpool Women’s Hospital is still
unclear.Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital
campaigns for a fully funded NHS and for Liverpool Women’s Hospital to
be upgraded on the Crown Street site.

The current management still favours a move that would cost at least £100 million. The April Board meeting said they were going to hold a clinical summit on this issue this summer. We call for a community summit too. The wishes of more than 50,000 petitioners cannot be ignored.

Liverpool Women’s hospital is inadequately funded by the NHS, as are many hospitals. Aintree, for example has major financial problems. There are underlying additional problems at Liverpool Women’s.

The maternity tariff is still inadequate.

The funding does not reflect the very specialist work that the hospital does. Birmingham CCG does recognize this for their women’s hospital, but not Liverpool.

The NHS insurance system is difficult for all obstetric providers but Liverpool has a historic (and disgraceful) case, significantly inflating premiums.

Most of these problems stem not just from inadequate funding, real though that is, but from the “Internal market” imposed on the NHS by wave 2 privatization.

The Liverpool Women’s Hospital makes decisions within the policies of the Merseyside and Cheshire Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP). This plan describes extreme reductions in spending.

LWH also has to cope with damaging decisions like the withdrawal of bursaries from midwives and nurses training, and an inadequate number of training places for doctors in the whole country. Staff are consequently overworked and underpaid.

Women in the UK as elsewhere have a right to a long healthy life. But we are going to have to fight for it.

Staff keep the NHS going despite the privatisers, and despite the
government.

Campaigners are winning some battles.

The strikers at LWH won, well done.

Well done to all who are fighting for the NHS, and especially to the victory in Ealing where plans for major closures have been withdrawn! Let us hope these victories give courage to all who support the NHS and better the pay and working conditions for staff. Let Ealing’s victory give courage to all who fight for our hospitals. Campaign groups for the NHS are growing. Come and join us!

The privatisation model this government and the NHS national administrators are working on is not just of making the sick pay for their individual treatment. That “patient pay system” is is starting in various ways, including charging migrants. Patient pay and refusal to treat without payment will get the biggest backlash. Right now, their kind of privatisation is more diverting the huge taxpayer spend on health into the pockets of big business.

Just one example of the shift from public wealth to private gain was seen in 2017 when NHS plasma supplies were sold off by Tories for £230 million, then sold on to a Chinese company for £820 million. Nearly £500million profit that was yours and mine, but went into private pockets.

The biggest privatisation of the NHS is underway. The break up of the national NHS into 44 STP or accountable care areas is a precurser to the privatisation of the whole system, a step further in the privatisation process than the contracts given out previously, huge though they were. Campaigners and trade unions face their biggest battles ever, Increasingly workers in outsourced companies are taking action against the privatising companies who are not meeting NHS pay levels, (and NHS pay is are low enough already).

A comprehensive service, providing the best available treatment for all

This original model of health care is the most cost effective and most efficient form of healthcare service delivery in the world. It was responsible for dramatically improving women’s lives and reducing infant and maternal mortality. It is much less expensive, and more effective to the nation than the US insurance model. We cannot afford this government and the NHS national administrators who are closely linked to private companies. Out sourcing, PFI and financially unstable outsourcing firms like Interserve, are only good for the international health corporations.

In a recent study that compared access to and quality of health care in 195 countries by analysing ‘health care-amenable mortality’ – ie, mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal if effective health care is in place – the UK is ranked 30th out of 195 countries – its overall score was similar to Portugal and Malta but lower than comparable countries like Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

We also have fewer doctors per head of population than other comparable EU countries.

Every NHS hospital in the land, and all public and community health services, require major new investment for day-to-day running. Meanwhile much needed money is being squandered on outsourcing, PFI and privatisation.

Please get involved and fight for the NHS, fight against privatisation, for keeping NHS funding for the NHS, not letting it leak out to the private sector.

Statutory Instrument2019No. 248 makes major changes to the existing contractual arrangements for providing GP Primary Care services. Thesechanges are to enable Integrated Care Providers (formerly called Accountable Care Organisations) to run a whole range of hospital, primary care and community health services for their given area and its population.

Now Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ashworth and other MPs are sponsoring aPrayer Motion(National Health Service EDM #2103)that calls for the Statutory Instrument’s annulment:

“That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, praying that the Amendments Relating to the Provision of Integrated Care Regulations2019 (S.I.,2019, No. 248), dated 13 February2019, a copy of which was laid before this House on 13 February2019, be annulled.”

WHY WE’RE ASKING FOR YOUR HELP

It would enable new Integrated Care Providers (formerly called Accountable Care Organisations) to directly employ GPs to deliver a modelof primary, mental health and community health care that would radically change patients’ (and GPs’) experience of the NHS. This islikely to damagean area’s NHS organisations AND the health needs of the public.

Recent reports by the National Audit Office and the Nuffield Trust say there is no evidence that this new model would meet the intendedaims of reducing costs and improving quality of patient care. And the Chair of the BMA has told GP members they‘should not feel pressured into entering an Integrated Care Provider contract as to do so could leave their patients worse off.’

We must take this seriously. We feel strongly that these major changes should not slide through Parliament in secondary legislation withoutany oversight by MPs.

THERE IS HOPE

Getting this Prayer Motion passed is a long shot. But we hope you’ll agree it’s worth trying. The stakes are high and we should seize anychance of stopping this undemocratic move by the Dept. of Health and NHS England.

Women need the NHS, for themselves, for the babies, and for
their communities.

Women of the Labour movement fought hard for decades to found a National Health Service. Despite the huge difficulties, and after decades of struggle, in 1948, with the great reforming Labour Government, they succeeded. Some of these women recounted being mocked for demanding health care free at the point of need for all, but they fought on.

Now The NHS is being dismantled before our eyes. Fight like your grandmothers and great grandmothers, fight like hell to win back the NHS. You can make a difference. Get in touch with campaigns or set up one yourself. You will find lots of help.

The Women’s Cooperative Guild fought for a health service more than a century ago

Profit, not
human need, is driving NHS cuts. Some of the wealthiest corporations in the
world are involved, invited in by this government.

Building blocks of the NHS

The NHS was
founded to be a national service. A
national service shares the risks of more than 66.02 million people. It
provides a huge base for research, data and professional education.

The NHS was founded to be

Free at the point of need

Publicly provided

Available for everyone

A comprehensive service

Funded from general taxation (So the
bosses pay too, not just the workers).

Using this model, the NHS became the world leader in health care. We saw nearly 70 years of consistent investment, of professional training and great returns in money invested and women’s lives improved, babies survived.

The NHS was far from perfect, the UK did not and does not top the charts for women’s health or for babies health. Campaigners are realistic about the problems. But, we can afford a decent NHS.

Health care is a great investment. Every pound invested returns £3 to the economy. Poor health care means pain and worry, unfit people, less competent workers, more people giving up work to care for family members who are ill, and lower GDP.

Health care spending at Western European levels would give us a good NHS, we don’t need a money tree.

There are two distinct waves of deliberate disruption, privatization, and marketization of the NHS, and each wave is damaging our health and the service itself. Step one started with Blair legislation but comes now from the Coalition’s Health and Social Care Act, 2012. It is cruel and vicious.

These
changes are wrapped in the sugary language of “progress”, “efficiency”
“consultation”, and “personalization”. In cold reality, they mean:

Deliberate shortage of money and resources

Bad planning of staff training, recruitment, and retention so we are short of doctors, nurses, midwives, and other health professionals

Cuts in the number of hospital beds

The internal market and the Hospital Trust system which sets hospitals up to compete, significantly increasing costs and administration

The Commissioning model, which massively increased private providers moving into the NHS, and is inefficient and wasteful.

The NHS is no longer for everyone. Many are charged – especially if their skin is not white. (Please see our blog or Docs not Cops for more on migrant charging)

Not all services are now provided

Maternity services are inadequate

Mental health care has been wrecked, especially for children

The involvement of financial consultants from huge corporations, supporting the involvement of profit-making bodies.

Social care

Every human society has to care for its elders. Yet since Thatcher, our elder care has been privatized. Whilst it started as small often family enterprises, they have now been consolidated into big corporations

Social care
is means-tested and badly funded. Staff less well paid, with less professional
development than in the NHS. Social care is in deep crisis. None of the NHS
changes addresses these issues. Heath and social care working well together is
an admirable aim, but the Integrated
Care system does not address this at all. It is an accountancy measure.

Maternity faces closures of units and hospitals, as well as half of them, being so full they have turned mothers away, sending them to other units; such is “choice” in this situation. There is a profound and increasing shortage of midwives, shortages of obstetricians and related professionals. Postnatal care is especially hard hit.

Interested in a national camapign for maternity care? Please get in touch!

In NHS newspeak, every issue is supposedly to do with a mother’s choice, but somehow, not if that choice is to give birth in her own town or city, or the maternity unit she has chosen. No, these cuts and closures, we are told, are essential! Continuity midwife services much vaunted in the propaganda would require at least fifty percent more midwives to implement nationwide One NHS spokesman claimed it was fine to travel for four hours to access obstetric care. It is not just maternity though. All services for women matter. Any improvement in women’s health has halted thanks to austerity and NHS cuts. UK women on average endure 18 years of ill health.The gap in life expectancy between women and men is closing downwards. Austerity is shortening our lives. Liverpool Women’s Hospital is always in peril in this system.

2019 wave of privatization is happening now in every area of England. The NHS and social care are being reorganized. It looks like this

Find out more, spread the word.!

Step 2 looks like this;

Not even all councillors know what is happening, yet councillors can have a say in this through health and well being boards.

Campaigners can alert the public. Councillors can intervene to oppose
this at Health and Well-being boards; they can shine a spotlight on the issue
and rouse public opposition. Councillors can challenge it. Telford and Wrekin Councillors have done just that. The ICO is
slightly different in each area, but is all to the same end.

Across the country local campaigns are working to thwart these plans, a
whole social movement is developing. We need ever-growing campaigns, and to win
a Labour government who will return the NHS to its original model.

Campaigning outside your local hospital gets the word out that we will not sit idly by while they steal our NHS

Today the Liverpool Women’s Hospital digs the first turf to mark the start of the new, much needed NeoNatal Unit This investment of £15 million is the way that we want to see Liverpool Women’s Hospital grow and thrive.

February 2019. Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital is still campaigning for a fully funded Liverpool Women’s Hospital, for the NHS, for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers, and for the babies. We campaign with the public and with trade unions, women’s organizations and pensioners to challenge the people with the power to make these decisions. The real decision makers are the Government, their friends in the multinational health care companies, and their local appointees. In reality, an ordinary doctor or nurse has little say., and few approve of what’s happening to the NHS.

Despite underfunding, Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and the NHS work wonders. The day to day caring work of NHS staff continues, under pressure, and meanwhile, these battles are fought out in boardrooms, with big companies and international politics. There are very real dangers ahead for staff and patients.

We want LWH to be upgraded on site with full cooperation with all local and regional hospitals. We want bloods, diagnostics and imaging all upgraded. We want parent accommodation for the neonates. We want the hospital to go on caring for Liverpool people. This campaign offers solidarity to people trying to improve working conditions in the hospital.

We want the money from the government as much as the Board does but not for the same purpose

We have consulted a leading obstetrician and a team of health workers in different professions, about our objections. Some of our activists fought and lost to stop the PFI at the Royal., which was as passionately supported by the Board at the Royal as this ” move” is supported at the Liverpool Women’s hospital. Doctors are not trained in health economics, nor are they infallible. The doctors and managers who supported PFI were very fallible about the Royal

The late Sam Semoff campaigner for the NHS and a fierce opponent of PFI

Tectonic plates are moving in the NHS. Different types of privatization are fighting over the NHS, which continues to be underfunded and the staff overworked.

Good health care is an investment that repays the money paid by the country three times over.

Back to basics

The NHS model was designed to provide all the treatments needed, for all the people, and not for profit. This model is the most efficient and the most cost-effective, focusing the maximum money on the patient and the least on profit and admin

The UK can well afford a good health service. Funding to
western European levels would easily sort the NHS problems.

Bad health care is expensive and wasteful, to the country as
a whole, and bad for the individual and bad for their families.

Women fought for
decades to establish
a health service, and that campaign started in Liverpool. For 70 years,
everyone has benefitted from women who persisted.

The Women’s Cooperative Guild was one of the local organizations fighting to set up the NHS, and especially to care for women and children

The current part-privatized NHS model spends money on financial consultants and private profit, money that should go to treating patients.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is in the midst of (often-chaotic) change in the NHS.

There has been significantly more privatization since the Health and Social Care Act. This gave parcelled up services to private companies to run under the NHS label. Now the model of privatization is changing. Local commissioning is going. CCGs are merging. Hospitals are being closed or merging.

The internal market is now challenged as wasteful. The model of Foundation Trusts is being criticized. Instead, the NHS is being divided into 44 Accountable care services. These services must work within a set budget so rationing is required. The treatment might be needed but it will not necessarily be given, and admin rather than doctors will say yes or no to treatment like an insurance company does. This is being brought in, gradually across the country.

How to boil a frog. If you put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out. If you put it in tepid water and heat the water up the frog does not know it is being boiled, it sits and cooks. So privatization is done on the sly.

Capital Spend

The NHS needs money for day to day services, (revenue) and capital spend, money to build new hospitals, NHS capital spending was squandered by the PFI scandals that built flawed hospitals and charged way above the cost of the build, and are still raking it in. Liverpool Royal is just the worst of the scandals. The new Royal will now be completed without a PFI! The money will come from the government directly. PFI( and it’s variations with different initials ) is now disgraced, and not available for the move favoured by the management at LWH. (See pages page 177 to 179 of the pre-consultation business case for their earlier

Huge public health hazards like the toxic diesel particulates that accumulate in the placenta, cannot be ignored. The health campus, with major corporations, on the Royal site, is highly questionable for pregnant women and babies.

Our campaign wants to keep a women’s hospital, on site. We
think this site is safer and we think a focus on women’s health is essential.

This is a shared post from POHG research and campaign group. It gives us information and requests our help. Please help if you have the time to do some google research through documents about your local area.

In 2014, America’s largest health insurer UnitedHealth saw their President of global expansion installed as Chief Executive of the NHS in England.

UnitedHealth is right now embedding its subsidiary company Optum as an integral part of NHS GP care nationwide, through its financial control systems and IT systems (including the Scriptswitch software). This insurance company has sold these Trojan Horse systems into the Clinical Commissioning Groups which control our GP services nowadays.

Case study – NHS Ealing Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG)

UnitedHealth subsidiary Optum has been installed in NHS Ealing CCG’s clinical and financial decision making, with tasks that require its access to patients’ confidential medical records.

How many NHS contracts like this are in place across the country already, positioning UnitedHealth to access commercially valuable patient data that the patients thought they had shared only with their family doctor?

We can all work together to identify and publicise where UnitedHealth and Optum are gaining footholds within our NHS

If you feed back what you find about all this in your area on to this and the Public Health list, and also share your information and the crowdsourcing request with all of your interested contacts, then soon we’ll all have a much clearer picture of this threat, and the specific contracts, locations and public officials involved.

Please use your access to search engines, libraries, experts and any other resources and contacts you can think of, to uncover and document deals that have been struck by UnitedHealth/Optum, and what roles they are in with your own CCG and neighbouring ones in your part of the country.

“We want the absolute best for our patients all the time.” Liverpool Women’s Hospital doctors said on the BBC program ‘Hospital’ on 25th January 2019

The staff also stressed the importance of the hospital as a safe space for women.

Some of the great work Liverpool Women’s Hospital does was shown on the programme. Oddly the very real problems were presented, not as a consequence of underfunding, cuts and privatization, overworked staff and faults in the NHS structures, but as a consequence of it being a standalone hospital!

Liverpool Women’s hospital operates in a climate of cuts and shortages, like all the NHS in 2019. The basic maternity tariff is inadequate. There are significant cuts, underfunding and staff shortages across the NHS. There is a shortage of doctors, midwives, nurses, and other key staff groups. The bureaucrats seem to grow in number. Financial consultants, not the medical ones, are making loads of money from the NHS. This arises from Government policy, and only from that. Somehow this did not feature in the programme.

We have to fight for a fully funded NHS, stop the cuts, train more doctors and nurses. We want to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Keep the only women’s hospital in the land!

The move to the Royal has not been funded, at least not this year. If it had been approved earlier it would have been a PFI! We oppose this move, we oppose the PFI! A move to the Royal site, especially in its current chaos, would be wrong in many ways.

We want people also to recognize that particulates from diesel damages babies. Most of the rest of the world has got this message. The move to the Royal presents significant problems in putting the babies into a hazardous situation. That is not the only reason we oppose that move.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital should stay where it is and be improved on site. Already £15 million is being spent on upgrading the neonatal provision. Moving the hospital would be a major mistake.

All of the NHS is at risk. In this situation, we need to defend what we have “What we have we hold!” Other experiences of closures have not been good ones. Other experiences of building at the Royal and building using PFI were catastrophic.

This is the only hospital fully devoted to the needs of women, in the whole of the UK. Women’s health needs much more research and more focussed research. Young women and girls are still crippled by period pain, not all contraception is safe, fertility is problematic for many and women, on average, live with ill health for 18 years.

We need research and dedicated treatment to prevent stillbirths and into birth injuries. We need research and dedicated treatment to deal with post-natal injuries to women

We need to stop low birth weight and illnesses in babies

We need research into women’s mental health

For all of this, we need the emphasis and focus on women.

Problems with recruiting Cancer specialists

The programme stressed the shortages of consultants and difficulties in recruiting to the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. A clear future for the Liverpool Women’s will surely help this.

The problem’s with cancer recruitment are not confined to Liverpool Women’s Hospital. This problem must be addressed nationally and locally. Of course, doctors from different hospitals should cooperate, as the surgeon described. Such cooperation is hindered financially and organisationally by the Foundation Trust system. This system has to go to be replaced by a system that promotes cooperation and cuts undue bureaucracy.

The Women’s Hospital Building

The hospital is a good building, better than many newer onesLiverpool Women’s Hospital is 23 years old. It is a good hospital building only a few years older than the first of the flawed PFI hospitals built across the country. The site is set back from the road and landscaped to keep traffic away.

Problems with the Royal site

There is a half finished new hospital, a hospital that will need demolishing and a cramped site in heavy traffic. It would be dangerous to have Liverpool babies born in such a situation.Traffic fumes, and especially particulates, are very dangerous for babies. “Burning fossil fuels is now “the world’s most significant threat to children’s health”. Their life chances are compromised before they are born. Toxic particles from exhaust fumes pass through the lungs of pregnant women and accumulate in the placenta. The risk of premature birth, and low birth weight, this causes, is described in the British Medical Journal as “something approaching a public health catastrophe”. Guardian

The move to the Royal site is part of a larger project, not one that focuses on the needs of our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers nor for the precious babies. The move is part of this plan “The Campus can provide 100,000 square metres of space devoted to life sciences. This will provide development space for companies involved in research, pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. The Campus will capitalize on its location with a unique concentration of health, academic and industry life science assets; the famous Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (extensively supported by Bill Gates), the National Zoonoses Centre, Medical School, Dental School, centre for drug safety science, Wolfson Centre for Personalised Medicine, pharmaceutical and biomedical industry.”

The move is also part of the plan to close one of Liverpool’s Hospitals, which is well documented. Liverpool Women’s Hospital should stay where it is and be improved on site. Already £15 million is being spent on upgrading the neonatal provision. Remember Liverpool Women’s Hospital it is less than a mile away from the Liverpool Royal Hospital site

All of the NHS is at risk. In this situation, we need to defend what we have “What we have we hold!” Other experiences of closures have not been good ones.

This is the only hospital fully devoted to the needs of women, in the whole of the UK. Women’s health needs much more research and more focussed research.

The Liverpool Women’s Hospital is a great hospital where staff, in general, are happy to work. It saves many lives and helps launch thousands more tiny lives each year. In the midst of all the damage being done to the NHS, saving Liverpool Women’s Hospital is crucially important, for all our mothers, sisters, daughters, friends and lovers and for all the babies born there.

Liverpool Women’s Hospital is the subject of a programme #Hospital, which shows some of the outstanding work of the hospital and talks about a major recruitment crisis at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

The Chief Executive of LWH is reported as saying “Alongside the patient stories featured, you will see some of the other challenges we face as an NHS Foundation Trust, including our desire to protect our services for the long-term future by moving to a new Liverpool Women’s Hospital on the campus of the new Royal Liverpool Hospital site.”

The time money and effort put into the flawed plan to move the hospital less than a mile down the road, has perhaps distracted the board, if we are now to believe that after all recruitment is the problem. This crisis in recruitment has not featured greatly at the board meetings of LWH which our campaigners have attended for the last number of years.

Our campaign sees the move as a serious risk to the service provided by Liverpool Women’s Hospital. The people of the UK and of Liverpool have lost many NHS beds and services, we have had to pay for crazy dangerous projects like Carillion at the Royal PFI, all of which have been “sold” to the public with false gravitas by NHS strategists and politicians. Not many apologies have been forthcoming when they have been proved so very wrong.No apologies for leaving the NHS short of beds, no apologies for the PFI scandal. Why? These projects have made a lot of rich people much richer

There is though a shortage of doctors and many who train either take time out or leave altogether or want to work part-time. Doctors are human and often female. Women need time off to have babies. Men too want paternity leave. Ridiculous working hours and stress make it harder to retain staff.

There is a shortage of doctors at pretty much every stage.

The basic causes of the shortage are

1. The UK has not trained enough doctors and relied on recruiting from abroad. There are many overseas doctors working in the NHS. These medics are most welcome and badly needed.

2. Cuts, privatisation and underfunding are driving significant deterioration of the work experience for staff

3.Recently, there has been a drop in recruitment from the EU.

There are some recruitment issues specific to the main specialisms, obstetrics, and gynecology, in the Liverpool Women’s hospital. The most commonly mentioned was difficulty in recruiting to rural areas. Being in a rural area is not a problem at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

The NHS is a huge, massively successful institution, but one that has been battered and bruised in the storms of privatization, globalization and government policy.

The problems of the NHS, nationally and locally, have not been adequately reported by the mass media, with some honorable exceptions

When the plans for Wirral walk-in closures was mooted, the local BBC gave the management time on local radio to sell the appalling plans, without any comparable balance from the opposition, although the opposition has been proved valid.

Before the September 2018 Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital demonstration Radio Merseyside gave management time to oppose our demonstration with no comparable response time from the campaigners.

When the Carillion PFI collapsed, no adequate reporting was made of the long campaign of local opposition to the whole Carillion PFI project at the Royal Liverpool Hospital.

The Hospital programme on BBC 2 has given some good coverage but has not spoken (to our knowledge) to NHS campaigners in the area, even though campaigners have worked hard over issues like the PFI in Carillion New Royal Hospital, the overall cuts, and to Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

In all of these changes, the media have given little coherent coverage. There have been some detailed programmes but the messages from one series are not reflected in the news or subsequent programmes.

The reality of mass privatization, of PFI, and lack of oversite in huge public procurement projects goes largely unreported

The NHS is a mass of contradictions. It saves life, but makes its staff ill from overwork. It is designed as a universal service but refuses life-saving treatment to some, based on dodgy migration status rules.

Recent changes mean that crucial treatments are rationed or refused causing greater cost further down the road, as the patiant needs more expensive care later in life.

The NHS needs a steady stream of investment in its buildings but wastes that money on PFI. It claims to be run by doctors but spends exorbitant amounts on the use of financial and accountancy consultants. It introduced the “Internal Market” and “Foundation Trusts” proclaiming that competition promotes efficiency but reality shows these experiments as costly, wasteful and at times deadly. The NHS is underfunded but hospitals are described as “overspending” or “in debt”.

The Commissioning mode and outsourcing have been expensive and inefficient. For example, great services like local sexual health services have been privatized to an untried service. It is not all roses in the NHS, and along with the cuts. there can from time to time be real neglect, and desperate mistakes.

There are very good, careful journalists, but somehow the account of the NHS given in the mass media does not match the crisis.

The national NHS and individual Hospitals spend a lot of money on press, media and public relations. Liverpool Women’s Hospital paid for full page adds to counter our campaign demonstration. They have established links with the media press. Hospitals employ professional companies for some projects.

The mega corporations using the NHS to make profit have major involvement in the ownership and control of the media.

Campaigners have to keep working for good press and media coverage and keep using social media which is more open to us.

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